Last updated on January 13, 2025
A few days after the 2016 election, Conan O’Brien opened his show with a quote that has stuck with me since I watched it when I was 13.
“In America, we get to pick who is going to ruin our country. And it’s up to us. We get to choose. And it’s a privilege… Now today, Americans have the right to feel happy, angry, pessimistic, and optimistic. But everybody should feel grateful we get to vote, and if we don’t get our way, we have the chance to try again. It is a beautiful thing.”
Another chance to try again is tomorrow. And for those of us who have an almost crippling addiction to monitoring the polls, the betting markets, and the news cycles, there is a sense of relief. It’s like finishing a midterm after you holed up in the library for three days.
Just to give a brief electoral count prediction: I think Trump will walk away with it. Just looking at the electoral math of the race, Trump will probably win Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada. And Harris will probably hold Michigan and Wisconsin, which means the election comes down to Pennsylvania. Both the 538 forecasts and RCP polling average for the Keystone state favor Trump, and I am still skeptical about how polls readjusted for their Trump bias after underestimating his margins in 2020.
Lastly, as I discussed in my last column and it’s mostly been true since then, Kamala Harris in 2024 is underperforming Joe Biden in 2020. And given how close that election was, the Democrats could build skyscrapers out of the anxiety they are feeling.
For Congress, the Republicans will more than likely flip the Senate and maybe cling to their House majority. We could possibly look at a unified Republican congress come November, but if not, Trump will become a lame-duck president on day one with a Democratic-controlled House.
That’s the cold math of the election, but the actual implications of this election are far more interesting.
There is nothing more that can be said to add or detract from the Harris or Trump campaigns at this point. From the missed opportunities with vice presidential picks, flubbed speeches, or incomprehensible policy proposals, both candidates felt like high school presidential hopefuls. I honestly almost bought into a conspiracy theory that Harris’s comms team was intentionally torching her campaign when she refused to attend the Al Smith dinner and instead sent a pre-recorded, cringe-inducing tape.
And Trump … is Trump.
Yet, for some voters, this election has more or less devolved into a contest of not Trump vs. Harris, but Trump vs literally anyone else. Put aside the belief that the Democrats supplanted a floundering, incoherent Joe Biden with an equally floundering, incoherent Kamala Harris. Or put aside the Democrats’ inability to translate legislative success to electoral ones. Ever since he beat Hilary in 2016, the elections of the past decade have been a referendum on Trump.
This is why I have said in past columns that I believe that, whether he wins or not, this is Trump’s last election. There is a chance that Republican primary voters may prop up an 82-year-old, twice-failed presidential nominee in 2028, but I think (and hope) that a demoralized and battered GOP will put their faith in someone who can actually win an election.
But even if he loses, politics will never be the same again. In both his actions and the Democrats’ reactions, the overturn window of American politics has widened so much that almost everything is normalized. To give an example of this, I was more surprised that Biden dropped out of the race than when Trump was shot. And honestly, Trump can’t really say anything further that would shock me.
And that’s my point. He aired out the vitriol of politics. One of the smartest political observations I have heard was when Andrew Yang said that Trump was a symptom of a disease rather than the cause of it. Even if Trump loses in tomorrow’s election, the Democrats still have to reconcile with the fact that tens of millions of Americans may vote for him because he is the grand repudiation of the establishment.
With a Harris presidency, there can not be this arrogant reaffirmation of the pre-Trump era — when that is precisely why he was elevated in the first place. There is no super glue to fix the broken China.
The Democrats also cannot be reductive in analyzing a Trump win. If he is reelected, it’s not because over 80 million Americans woke up and decided to be racist or misogynistic. Or because they even like Trump. It’s a battle of who the Americans hold more consternation and grievance among the two candidates.
Now for the Republicans. A Democratic House majority will probably stop any “fascist” tendencies by Trump. But even if the GOP clinches the lower chamber’s majority, it’s still hard to take Democrats seriously when politicians like Chuck Schumer dine with Trump at the Al Smith dinner or when Biden puts on a Trump hat. You simply don’t do that if Trump was actually Hitler.
However, that’s not to overlook Trump’s wild threat to our guardrails. One of the most interesting interviews of this election cycle was when Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris debated on Bari Weiss’s show this past week. Shapiro’s argument for Trump was simple.
“Donald Trump was a better president than Kamala Harris would be with all Donald Trump’s flaws and with all of his excesses because we do have a very robust and durable constitutional system almost built to hem in his flaws and excesses. What that means is that I get a lot of good policy that I wouldn’t get with Kamala Harris.”
Shapiro is being really generous with all of Trump’s “flaws and excesses.” What he is referring to is Trump’s attempt to stop the congressional certification of the electoral college in January 2021, and he has maintained on several occasions that our constitutional system has held together despite such egregious attempts. That’s true, but the way he remarks about it so casually as if it’s just routine for Trump to deny the 2020 results, speaks once again to this tragic normalization of politics.
Later in the interview, Shapiro and Harris debated January 6th.
“If Mike Pence obeyed him, we would have had a genuine constitutional crisis.” – Sam Harris
“I agree with you which is why I think Mike Pence did the right thing, and I think the argument that Donald Trump was making between November and January was morally and legally specious. With that being said, there was a peaceful transition of power.” – Ben Shapiro
First of all, there was a successful transition of power, not a peaceful one. But more importantly, compare that to what Shapiro said on his show the day after January 6th, 2021.
“What we saw yesterday is inexcusable, unjustifiable, awful on every level. Just terrible. When you have rioters taking over the U.S. Capitol building, the seat of American democracy … frankly I think that in in many ways, it’s the worst thing to happen to the United States of America since 9/11. It was cataclysmically awful.”
In my opinion, this comparison in tone reveals a ruthless pragmatism of normalizing the insane. Why strain the durability of our institutions? As I said, the Democrats taking the House may stifle a Trump presidency, and there are numerous guardrails in our system to prevent Trump from realizing his base inclinations. But the mere existence of such guardrails does not justify excess pressure on those guardrails.
This is the great defining moment for our nation. Put aside the policy and the projected margins of this election, the American people have to determine for themselves the limiting principles of our government. At what point are we willing to compromise institutions in pursuit of economic or international superiority? How much are we willing to stomach to give way to populism that only lasts as long as the figurehead? Do politicians have a greater obligation in policymaking or defining culture?
These questions won’t be answered with tomorrow’s election, but at least it will give us insight into what the American electorate values.
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